Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Jack:

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Jack Kilmon <jkilmon AT historian.net> wrote:

>
>
>
> Either the Bible is accurate history, and much of secular history not worth
>> the paper it is written on, as some of us believe, or the Bible is
>> ahistorical legend and secular history is accurate, as others of us
>> believe.
>> This is simple logic applied to standard linguistics.
>>
>
>
> There is a middle ground between these two choices, Karl.


Actually, there is a third option, which I neglected to mention as I thought
it irrelevant in the context of this discussion, namely that both Biblical
records and secular history are wrong. That was the position taken by
Immanuel Velikovsky and his followers.


>  The two choices rise from modern historical standards and neglects that
> ancient authors did not follow those rules.


How do you know that at least some did not follow what are essentially
modern historical standards?


>  Biblical authors were not relating history and what actually happened but
> what that happening MEANT. It was standard praxis to ornament and exaggerate
> to relay the importance of an event that would otherwise be ignored.


 What makes you think that Biblical authors did not relate accurate history?

Just because other people (especially the Egyptians) did not follow the
practice of relating accurate history, does that mean that Israel’s authors
didn’t?


>   It was also standard to create a fiction surrounding an event if that
> fiction relayed what the author saw as a "greater" truth. This is the basis
> of midrash and theologoumenon.


But in this group we are not talking about midrash and theologoumenon,
rather what does the text say? Whether or not we trust what it says is a
theological question that is off the table, but we cannot ask the
theological question until we have an accurate understanding of the text
according to standard linguistic principles. Whether you trust the account
or not, that question is irrelevant to the fact that Tanakh puts Abraham as
having lived in the early bronze age era, and to assert a different time
period is the same as to claim that Genesis is ahistorical fiction, possibly
constructed around a dimly remembered historical event in the same manner as
Homer’s poems.


>  At this point, however, I may be getting dangerously close to being off
> topic and will leave discussions of what is historical and what is not for
> another list.
>

Good idea. Let’s agree to disagree on issues where we have no documentation.


>
> Best regards,
>
> Jack
>
> Jack Kilmon
> San Antonio, TX
>

Karl W. Randolph.